A new device branch called ‘muskie‘ can now be found in the latest Android source drop, branch Android-8.0.0_r24, that was released along with the source code for the ‘walleye’ and ‘taimen’ Google Pixel 2/2 XL devices. There are a few interesting things we have found out so far about this device.

It was probably made by HTC

# battery driver settings for the retail demo environment where
# the device will be perpertually plugged in to a power source
on property:sys.retaildemo.enabled=1
write /sys/module/htc_battery/parameters/full_level_dis_chg 35

These lines indicate how the battery driver behaves when the device is in a retail demo mode, such as those models currently being displayed in Verizon Wireless stores across the United States. Notably, the kernel parameter path has “htc” in it which indicates the battery was manufactured by HTC.

It had a huge battery

The Google Pixel 2 XL has a huge 3,520 mAh battery, but it appears that the unreleased ‘muskie’ model had an even larger battery—3,830 mAh to be more precise. This can be found in the power_profile.xml file.

<item name="battery.capacity">3830</item>

This finding is particularly interesting because earlier reports suggest that the ‘muskie’ model was scrapped in favor of the larger ‘taimen’ Pixel 2 XL. Why would a presumably smaller model have a much larger battery?

It had the same DPI as the Pixel 2 XL

A smaller finding, but the DPI of the ‘muskie’ Pixel 2 model was apparently 560—the same as the Pixel 2 XL made by LG.

Clearly, it is expecting the target device to be one of ‘muskie’, ‘walleye’, or ‘taimen’ which is the unreleased Pixel device, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL respectively.

Conclusion

It’s interesting to see this unreleased device show up so unceremoniously in AOSP. We honestly expected to never hear from it again. From how much code it shares with ‘walleye’, the smaller HTC-made Google Pixel 2, we suspect that ‘muskie’ was likely going to be the larger Pixel 2 XL before Google brought LG on board. That would match the 1st generation Google Pixel devices which were both made by HTC, but merely had different sizes.

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Editor-in-chief on the XDA-Developers Portal. I have a keen interest in the Android framework and software development, but I'm willing to dip my toes into a variety of subjects.
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